Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Sundry Power Systems Withdrawals, New I/O Tweaks
March 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is a bit quiet out there in Power Systems land, but IBM is getting its house in order and making a few changes as it moves solidly into the Power8 era and puts older systems out to pasture. IBM also announced a few minor upgrades to the networking and virtualization features in the Power Systems line last week, and withdrew a key piece of WebSphere software from its catalog that might affect IBM i shops.
Let’s go over the tweaks to the Power Systems line first, which were detailed in announcement letter 115-043. IBM is partially fulfilling its
-
Power Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada. . . Vaulting Service Replaces Mirroring For IBM i Shop. . . Power Systems Academic Initiative Tops 300 Schools
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePower Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Maintenance and support is an important part of any IT vendor’s revenue and profit streams and these services are also what make IT shops more or less comfortable with using a piece of hardware or software for mission-critical work. And generally speaking, maintenance prices tend to rise over time because the cost of people tends to go up, too.
In IBM’s fourth quarter, maintenance services represented about 12 percent of the $13.5 billion in Global Services revenues, or about $1.6 billion, taking a 9 percent hit as IBM divested
-
Experimental Node.js Chatserver For IBM i
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRainer Ross, the intrepid IBM i developer that we profiled in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago because he had developed a hotel search engine that mashed up the IBM i platform with Big Blue’s Watson cognitive analytics software, has another project he has been working on. And Ross wants to get the word out that all of us need to work to get more applications running on the Power Systems-IBM i combination to ensure the longevity of the platform.
First, here is his sense of what we have to do to broaden the appeal of IBM i.
-
IBM Grants After License Amnesty For Software Maintenance
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreUnless a Federal judge overturns* the deal, IBM is going to be granting amnesty to customers using Power Systems iron who have let their Software Maintenance, or SWMA in IBMspeak, lapse. This maintenance service is available for the systems software, compilers, middleware, and related core software that is used by IBM i or AIX shops, and there are a lot of customers who have falling off the SWMA wagon. IBM wants to get them back on.
In an announcement letter sent to business partners, the Power Systems division and the U.S. Technical Support Services unit of Global Services are jointly
-
Considerations For Implementing Encryption On IBM i
February 18, 2015 Leo Salvaggio
… Read moreAlthough it started out as a technology aimed at the financial industry, data encryption has become the standard among all industries. Think about it: health records, social media accounts, and state and local records all contain personal information. At the same time, security breaches are becoming commonplace.
According to the “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States” by IBM and Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of a data breach is $5.9 million. That is a big price tag for an organization to pay for something that could have been prevented. That cost does not even take into
-
IBM Europe Deals On Power Systems, Raises Storage Prices
February 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the new year under way, with IBM shipping a substantially completed Power8-based system lineup, and with the company eager to ramp up its Power Systems sales, it would be reasonable to expect for Big Blue to be wheeling and dealing here in the first quarter of 2015. As it turns out, IBM has been quiet as a mouse on the deal front in the United States and Canada, but the company is cutting deals in Europe to bolster Power System sales. At the same time, paradoxically, and no doubt due to the strengthening US dollar, IBM Europe is raising
-
IBM Leads In Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
February 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is crowing like a chanticleer about its recent ranking as the top provider worldwide for both hybrid and private cloud infrastructure for 2014. The latest research shows that Big Blue is growing more or less at the same pace as the overall cloud, but it is a distant third behind the industry juggernaut, Amazon Web Services, and is growing at half the rate of the industry upstart, Microsoft Azure.
IBM has staked a big part of its future on the cloud and ponied up $1.2 billion last year to build out existing datacenters operated by its Global
-
Git To It
February 10, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In my last article we learned about Ruby methods and encapsulation. During the various exercises there were many code changes made and we didn’t really have a simple way to keep track of how the code changed from one version to the next. That’s where source change management (SCM) tools like git come into play and is what we will be diving into today.
The git Website says: “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large
-
Row Value Expressions Simplify Complex Row Selection
February 10, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreIf you like mile-long, messy, obfuscated, hard-to-read SQL, the kind that makes sane people want to cuss and spit on everybody and everything, then this tip is not for you. And please don’t apply for a job in my shop. But if you have better things to do than debug SQL, then I have a simple but clever technique for you.
Suppose the chief bean counter walks into your office and asks for a spreadsheet of general ledger transactions. He wants the current-month transactions for accounts 120, 135, 180, 192, and 198. Here’s how a novice would write the query
-
Create Excel Spreadsheets From DB2 Data With PHPExcel
February 10, 2015 Bruce Guetzkow
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
It is amazing that so many users manually key from a report into a spreadsheet for further analysis. PHPExcel is a tool that you can use to write directly to a spreadsheet for them. Here are the steps that you need to take to install and create a simple spreadsheet from DB2 data using PHPExcel.
Getting Started
The following are requirements to use PHPExcel on Power Systems on IBM i:
- Zend Server must be installed and running
- PHPExcel must be downloaded and installed
For the purposes of this